Prologue

     The grey Mazda 5 shot down the deserted country road at incredible speed. Barely in control, Judith Clastner gripped the wheel with such force that it was no longer circular but a compressed oval beneath her white knuckles. Tears ran down her face like the rain that pelted the windshield.

      She spoke the same words over and over in a low mantra, her voice no more than a harsh whisper. “Gotta get out... gotta get out... gotta get out..."

      The wheels of the car dipped suddenly onto the soft shoulder, kicking up a rooster tail of gravel and dirt until she dragged them back onto the hard pavement. “Gotta get out... gotta get out... gotta get out..."

     Her eyes flicked to the fuel gauge again. The needle was all the way over past the F, exactly the same as it had been fifteen seconds ago when she last checked it. A pang of guilt flashed through her mind, remembering how she had snuck into Bob Kout’s service station after hours and filled up. He never locked the pumps, it wasn’t that kind of town. Why should she feel guilty? Hadn’t she stuck a twenty through the locked door before she left? She had never been a thief, and she sure as Hell wasn’t going to risk dying as one.

    A sign appeared ahead out of the darkness, its jaunty little font mocking her with white lettering on a green background that read ‘You are now leaving Abbottsville, Ontario’. The town line was less than a mile ahead and Judith let out a strangled sound.

     “Gotta get out... gotta get out... gotta get out...”

     She pushed the accelerator all the way to the floorboards beneath her shiny black slingback heel and the car zoomed forward in a blur. She checked the gauges again, still full. The speedometer needle topped one hundred and fifty kilometres per hour and some part of her brain was oddly proud that her little car could go so fast.

      “Gotta get out... gotta get out... gotta get out...”

     She was going to make it; she was suddenly sure of it. The road ahead was clear, the tank was full of unleaded, her foot was mashed to the floor and the rain couldn’t stop her.

     The rain... it had rained every day since she decided to leave... harder and harder but rain couldn’t stop her. Now it was a proverbial deluge. Fat thick bullets of rain smacked against the windscreen and drummed on the roof inches above her head, sounding more like ball bearings bouncing on metal than mere drops of water.

      But the rain couldn’t stop her.

      “Gotta get out... gotta get out... gotta get out...”

    Less than a hundred yards now, she could see the town line clearly delineated because that was where the rain stopped. She remembered a trip she had taken to Orlando once, the five of them locked in a white minivan to save the cost of airfare. Her husband had been driving and it had poured with rain. The kind of rain you only saw in Florida, a hard fast summer rain without a cloud in the sky. It had been like driving through a car wash, but it had only been raining on their side of the highway. The other side was completely dry.

     But this was different... dark swirling clouds covered the small town but beyond the town line, she could see a clear star-filled sky. The line between wet and dry pavement was not blurred, it was a razor-straight edge, the rain stopping abruptly like a waterfall.

       ‘Who the fuck cares?’ she thought. ‘Rain can’t stop me...’

       “Gotta get out... gotta get out... gotta get out...”

      A small post with a green sign marked the end of Abbottsville. Half of the sign, the one inside of town, was wet with rain. The other side, out of town, was dry as a bone.

        “Gotta get out... gotta get out... gotta get out...”

     Judith stared at that sign, less than twenty feet now. She let out another strangled cry and at that moment something appeared... just appeared on the road directly ahead. In truth, the tree had shot up out of the surface of the blacktop, growing at incredible speed as if in a stop-motion film. A huge canopy of branches burst outwards at its top, leaves popping into existence in a frenzy of green that under any other circumstance would have been awe-inspiring.

      The trunk was at least a foot in diameter and stood directly in the dead centre of her lane.

       Judith screamed jamming both feet on the brake pedal so hard that she broke three toes on her right foot. She heaved the steering wheel to the right and the car went into a sideways skid at over one hundred and seventy kilometres per hour. Judith’s door collided with the tree at a perfect ninety-degree angle shearing the car completely in half and squeezing her body through the broken passenger side window like toothpaste squirting out of the tube.

      The Mazda’s engine continued to run for a full twenty seconds after the accident, using up the purloined gas in the fuel line until it finally sputtered and died. Judith’s right foot lay next to her head, the shoe was nowhere to be seen and her broken toes pointed off at odd angles. Her brain continued to repeat the mantra using up the last of the oxygenated blood in her head until it too sputtered and died.

        “Gotta get out... gotta get out... gotta... get...” 

      In the silence that followed the tree began to shudder and then pull back down into the earth. It’s wide umbrella of branches seemed to grasp, both the wreckage of Judith's car and then Judith herself dragging them slowly down into the blacktop. To an outside observer, of which there were none, it would have looked like a giant hand wiping the roadway clean.

      Finally, the last thin upper branches slithered back into the ground leaving a perfectly unmarred surface and no evidence of the carnage ofjust a few minutes before.

      The clouds over Abbottsville parted on a beautiful night sky full of twinkling stars and the rain stopped.